From November, 1913, onward, the Kaiser was busy preparing for early hostilities; he was aware that the enlargement of the Kiel Canal would be complete by July, 1914—therefore he arranged to be ready by that date, and as we know war was declared on August 1st, i.e., a few days after the completion of the Kiel Canal. The Arch-Duke Francis-Ferdinand, the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne, tempted by the Kaiser, is dazzled by the mirage of great profits which were to accrue from a joint action of the Central Powers. In April, 1914, the Kaiser goes on a visit to the Archduke at Miramar, near Trieste. Again he meets him at Konopischt in June, 1914, and is then accompanied by von Tirpitz, that notorious Chief of Pirates, that submarine Corsair. Now comes the right moment for drafting the bold main lines of the combined action of the German and Austrian forces by land and sea. The murder of the Arch-Duke Ferdinand, on June 28th, 1914, made no change in the Kaiser’s plans, it merely precipitated events by furnishing an excellent pretext for intervention against Serbia. Thus the criminal action of the Kaiser stands revealed; for twenty-five years he had been elaborating the Pangerman plan.
According to Baron de Beyens, who before the war was Belgian Minister at Berlin, “it has been maintained that William II. was an unconscious tool in the hands of a caste and of a party who needed war in order to assert their own power. William has, indeed, listened to them, but he has lent them an ear because their designs chimed in with his own. In the judgment of history it is he who is doomed to bear the responsibility for the disasters by which Europe has been overwhelmed” (Baron Beyens, L’Allemagne avant la guerre, p. 41, G. Van Oest, Paris).
For twenty-five years, and by order of the Kaiser, a violent Pangerman propaganda had been carried on throughout the Empire; therefore, let there be no mistake, William II., in declaring war, was supported in his decision, not only by the influential circles of German opinion, but by the large majority of the German people. A very notorious German, Maximilian Harden, has explicitly acknowledged this fact in his review Zukunft of November, 1914:
“This war has not been forced on us by surprise; we have desired it, and it was our bounden duty thus to desire it. Germany wages war because of her immutable conviction that greater world expansion and freer outlets are due to her by right of her own works” (quoted by Le Temps, 20th November, 1914).
Having thus formed and perfected for twenty years the Pangerman plot of a European conflagration, William II. had the prodigious audacity to declare, in his Manifesto to the German people (August 1st, 1915), after drenching Europe with streams of blood for a whole year: “Before God and before History, I swear that my conscience is clear. I did not desire war.”
CHAPTER I.
THE PANGERMAN PLAN.
I. The Pangerman plan of 1911.